Wireless telephony continues to evolve, both in terms of the features of the mobile devices that connect to the wireless networks and the speed of the networks. Mobile devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, and “smartphones” are gaining greater functionality and in turn increasing their utility value beyond basic voice communications and SMS texting/messaging.
Mobile phones, for instance, often include a camera, a keypad for entering text and other commands, an operating system, user interfaces and software applications for surfing the Web and for sending and receiving email and text messages, and radio transceivers for providing wireless wide area mobile data, GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity among others. These mobile devices, sometimes referred to as “smartphones,” can also function as wireless cellular data access modems. Users are able to set their smart phones to act as cellular data access modems via Menu Settings on the handset which interface with the device software stack and device hardware to change the smartphone from communications device to access device. Ironically, when the smartphone is set as an access device, the voice communications and other networking functions of the handset are often disabled.
Current implementations involve tethering the smartphone via USB or BlueTooth to the Laptop. This limits the smartphone to act as a wireless data access modem for a single user laptop. However the new opportunities created by embedding WiFi radios in Smartphones will enable WiFi communications between the Smartphone and Laptop (given nearly 100% of laptops have WiFi chipsets embedded already). In addition to enabling WiFi communications between a smartphone and a hotspot, smartphones can also be used both as WiFi access points and as modems to provide Internet access to other devices.
Internet access via a mobile device is provided via a carrier's network. The technology used by the network will determine in large part the data rate the between the mobile device and the network to which it is connected. When another device (such as a computer, a laptop, a PDA or other mobile device) uses the mobile device to connect to the Internet, either as a modem (sometimes referred to as “tethering”) or as a Wi-Fi access point, the connection between the other device and the mobile device will also affect the overall data throughput as experienced by the other device.
Mobile devices, such as smartphones, used as modems and mobile devices used as access points may be configured to provide connectivity simultaneously to a number of other devices. The number of such devices that may be connected at any one time to a mobile device used as an access point may be limited by the capabilities of the processor of the mobile device-access point, the power available to the mobile-device access point, and the speed of the connection between the mobile device-access point and the carrier network. Hence, the mobile device-access point becomes a bottleneck for communications generated by the access devices. In addition, a single device may make a data transfer (up or down stream) that can significantly impact the throughput of other access devices.